Hi everyone. I’ve been reading this forum and everything I could get my hands on about migraines for the last year or so. I finally decided to join today since I haven’t had a migraine since early February of 2011 and used to get at least 2-3 each month. I feel that I have some good info to contribute to the forum for anyone that wants to tackle their migraine with nutrition rather than prescription meds.

A little background.

As a kid and an adult I’ve always suffered from headaches but a couple of Excedrin usually got rid of them. In 2002 my headaches started to get bad. Excedrin didn’t work so well anymore and I would have to lie down for hours at a time in a dark and quiet room. The headaches evolved in to full blown migraines that would last up to 2.5 days. At the end of 2009 I started to mark each migraine I had on a calendar and by the end of 2010 I counted them up realizing I had spent 35 days that year in pain, throwing up, feeling like I wanted to die. I have a job in a small company where I can’t be out sick because there is no one else to cover for me, so migraine or not, I have to come to work and I have to do my job. The days I had a migraine was pure hell, since I’m in marketing and sit on the computer all day.

In early December of 2010 I had one of those bad migraines that lasted almost three days. My migraines used to come with horrible nausea and once I started to throw up I would continue for 24+ hours. And since I wasn’t eating during migraines, there was not much there to throw up. After this migraine went away I decided no more, and I started to do major research on the net. I have always ate well, exercised and have always been in to nutrition, so I focused on that.

I definitely was not going to go to a doctor and get on any prescription medication because I read that a ‘migraine’ is your body telling you “something is wrong” and I wanted to fix that something, not just take a bunch of pills to take the pain away.

After reading a lot of posts and articles I realized that my migrates were very different. First of all, I didn’t have any food triggers. I could eat cheese and drink wine. I started a food diary to see if there were any food connections to my migraines but there were none. I also knew my stomach had something to do with my migraines since I would get a stomach ache first, then I would no longer be able to process food or drink, it would just sit in my stomach, then came the head pain, then I would start throwing up. My stomach aches always started at 2-3AM and my head pain came in the morning, I would start throwing up between 10am-12noon.

What I realized was that my triggers were additives and preservatives in food. I quit eating all processed, packaged and fast food. Went to a mostly raw food diet. Started supplementing with Magnesium Citrate and started to drink Apple Cider Vinegar 2 times a day and started to drink at least 80 oz of water per day, and I reduced my sugar even more. I occasionally still get a headache when I stray from my diet, but Excedrin gets rid of it.